The production of information is critical to a healthy information diet. It's the thing that makes it so that your information consumption has purpose. I cannot think of more important advice to give anyone: start your day with a producer mindset, not a consumer mindset. If you begin your day checking the news, checking your email, and checking your notifications, you've launched yourself into a day of grazing a mindless consumption.
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But there's something else that being a producer do...

Sophistication of Political Discourse. Finally, let’s have a look at political discourse, which most people believe has been getting dumb and dumber. There’s no such thing as the IQ of a speech, but Tetlock and other political psychologists have identified a variable called integrative complexity that captures a sense of intellectual balance, nuance, and sophistication.283 A passage that is low in integrative complexity stakes out an opinion and relentlessly hammers it home, without nuanc...

The 1939 New York World's Fair - that so transfixed me as a
small visitor from darkest Brooklyn - was about 'The World
of Tomorrow'. Merely by adopting such a motif, it promised that
there would be a world of tomorrow, and the most casual glance
affirmed that it would be better than the world of 1939. Although
the nuance wholly passed me by, many people longed for such a
reassurance on the eve of the most brutal and calamitous war in
human history. I knew at least that I would be growing up i...